recover from broken yum transaction

[Michael Stone]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 01:06:24PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>Openly said, based on my experience with my i586, I don't buy this.
>Usually, the memory requirements introduced other applications are
>magnitudes above that of yum.

My impression is that our lack of swap really hurts us here; on most
systems, it's possible to swap some pages (dirty or clean) at relatively
fixed cost and keep going. We _suspect_ (but have not yet proven) that
on XOs, under memory pressure, we start thrashing code pages (which can
be unmapped since they are clean but which must be de-compressed in
order to be remapped) and eventually OOM when we finally receive an
allocation that cannot possibly be satisfied.

>However I am not sufficiently familiar with OPLC to be able to further
>comment on this.

If you would like to become sufficiently familiar with XOs to comment
further, it can be easily arranged, either through our Developer's
Program [1] or through a renewed G1G1 effort scheduled for November [2].

Please consider it -- we could use your help and it's a great way to
help OLPC get better at doing things the Fedora way.

Michael

[1]: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program
[2]: sneak preview; more information to follow in coming weeks